Prey 2 Preview for Xbox 360

Prey 2 Preview

Get down on your knees and play.

The current big question on the internet regarding Prey 2 is this: why did they get rid of portals? The official line is because portals aren't related to the story Human Head Studios want to tell with their FPS sequel, but I suspect it might have something to do with the fact that there's currently a perfectly decent game about portals doing the rounds and nobody would want to have their work compared side-by-side with Valve's.

Prey's original ideas are the same, according to developer Human Head Studios, and those themes of abduction and alien environments are now manifested in new protagonist Killian Samuels and the alien planet of Exodus, the player assuming the role of a free-running bounty hunter in an open world environment clearly influenced by Blade Runner.

You know what? I'm excited by that. Maybe you're the kind of person who isn't, and you've spent the last few weeks lamenting the decision to switch out a Cherokee protagonist for yet another white American soldier. At the end of the day, I thought Prey was a slightly stodgy shooter that never managed to escape the age of its 11-year development cycle, and I can't imagine anybody lamenting the original when faced with the refreshingly bold ambition of the sequel.

The game starts with you picking up the pieces of the airplane that was hoovered up by baddies in front of Tommy's eyes in Prey 1 - Samuels was on that plane, and he awakens on an alien ship within the wreckage of the aircraft. There are no other humans to be seen, but streaks of blood guide you around the fuselage and into a few confrontations with some of the aliens from the original Prey. Your hands are cut to shreds and you've only got a crummy pistol, and eventually you get knocked to the floor and knocked out with the butt of an alien rifle.

We flick to a later section, about a third of the way through the game, set in the Central City Bowery, an area rife with muggings, drug trafficking, and gambling. Supposedly this is the perfect place for a bounty hunter to set up shop. Exodus is a funny planet in that it doesn't rotate around an axis, so one side of the surface is always facing the sun. Central City is somewhere in the middle of these hot and cold zones, though you'll apparently visit all areas of the planet in the finished game.

Samuels tracks and eliminates his targets with guns, gadgets, and parkour, with upgrades for the former two available from various merchants scattered around the world. To see how different Prey 2 is to its predecessor you need only to look at the screen: weapons are holstered by default, and HUD elements are minimal. The focus seems to be on interaction, rather than shooting first.